1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for detecting a vehicle condition, more particularly to the method and apparatus for detecting a lane on a road by defining boundaries of the opposite sides of the road.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to define the boundary of the road, an article entitled "Correlation between Vehicle's Meandering and Driver's Arousal Level" is disclosed in the papers of JSAE (Society of Automotive Engineering of Japan, Inc.) Convention Proceedings 941, pp. 25-28 published in May, 1994. Another method is proposed in the Nikkei Industrial newspaper entitled "A Complete Reformed Large Truck" published on Jun. 6, 1996.
In these related publications, an image processing system is proposed for processing image information in a visible region in front of an automotive vehicle so as to be applied for various uses. According to the JSAE paper, the system detects meandering and the driver's alertness level from the front view of the vehicle. According to the newspaper, the truck detects a meandering condition of the vehicle from the front view of the vehicle. However, because the camera is mounted on the front portion of the vehicle, it is not possible to detect an obstacle in the rear area from the image information.